A Policy Description Language

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Knowledge Representation

A policy describes principles or strategies for a plan of action designed to achieve a particular set of goals. We define a policy as a function that maps a series of events into a set of actions. In this paper we introduce PDL, a simple but expressive language to specify policies. The design of the language has been strongly influenced by the action languages of Geffner and Bonet [GB98] and Gelfond and Lifschitz [GL93b] and the composite temporal event language of Motakis and Zaniolo [MZ97]. The semantics is founded on recent results on formal descriptions of action theories based on automata and their application to active databases. We summarize some complexity results on the hardness of evaluating polices and briefly describe the implementation of a policy server being used to provide centralized administration of a soft switch in a communication network.